Quotes About Inequality

There will be others like him," replied Lanny, "unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.

Rich people never forget they are rich...

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, 'You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.

By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US. But this is only a fraction of the potential total because among the nearly three billion people living in the world's warmest climates, fewer than 10 percent have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US or Japan.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.

Homo homini monstrum

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!

What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.

Fex urbis, lex orbis (The dregs of the city, the law of the earth), from Les Miserables, attributed to St. Jerome

A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.

A wretched woman is more unfortunate than a wretched man, because she is an instrument of pleasure.

He who has seen the misery of man only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of woman; he who has seen the misery of woman only has seen nothing, he must see the misery of childhood.

A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.

He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education?

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

Des marchands de sang humain criaient a tue-tête : Qui veut des places ?. Une rage m'a pris contre ce peuple. J'ai eu envie de leur crier : Qui veut la mienne ?

three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved;

Il visitait les pauvres tant qu'il avait de l'argent; quand il n'en avait plus, il visitait les riches.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right also to subject its members,on the one hand,to its crazy lack of foresight and,on the other,to its pitiless foresight,and to hold a poor man forever between a lack and an excess-lack of work and excess of punishment

It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages battle against, the people. Beggars